


False Fae

by Kir127



Category: Original Work
Genre: Changelings, Fae & Fairies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:34:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27593518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kir127/pseuds/Kir127
Summary: A child enters another world.





	False Fae

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work in progress. I am posting it here to recieve feedback and constructive criticism.

Once upon a time, there was a child, reading in bed. The book was about changlings. The child had noticed several similarities between theirself and the fairy children described in their book. Being quite logical, the child came to the conclusion that as they had a lot in common with faeries and very little in common with their peers or family, they must be a faery.   
Now being convinced that they did not belong in the world they found theirself in, they began to plot how to reach a world in which they did belong.   
Firstly, they needed information. The child had scoured their fairytale books, trying to figure out where they could find the doorway to the fairy world. She wanted to go the library to do further research, but their mom didn't have time to take them, and they didn't want to tell their mom why they needed to go. So they made do with their own books, though there were only two of them with changeling stories in. They both involved the mother going to the forest to send the changeling back. The child didn't think there were any forests in their city. According to the school librarian, there weren't many forests left on earth, and the entire country where the child lived was only a very tiny part of earth.   
They wondered if the small cluster of trees in the park near where their cousins lived counted. They doubted it, but they couldn't plan any of the rest of the plot without knowing where they were going. That was the first step.   
It was very frustrating to the child, to be stuck in a world they didn't belong in. They needed to think of where else a doorway to the fairyworld would be. Where else could be magical?  
They started to think about it all the time. After a while, they came to the conclusion that they should look everywhere they could. After all, Lucy got to Narnia through a wardrobe. They just hoped it was a door and not a natural disaster, like in the wizard of Oz, that was the way. They knew England rarely experienced those types of extremes.  
First they started in their bedroom. She looked under their bed, feeling hard against the carpet for evidence of a trap door. They looked in their own wardrobe but felt only chipboard beneath their fingertips.  
Next came the bathroom. The only place to look in there was the mirror. The child considered the toilet, but decided that was a silly way to get somewhere.  
The downstairs rooms were trickier. Their dad liked to watch telly in the living room, and he didn't like noise that wasn't from the telly. The child had to wait until he went to the pub to have a look round.  
The tv cabinet. Behind the fireplace. Underneath the coffee table. The child tried their best to look under the seatees but couldn't see anything magicky there.   
The kitchen was tricky because their mom didn't like the child to be in the kitchen whilst she was doing stuff in there, and she was doing stuff in there when the child got up to go to school, and when they got back from school, and nearly all day Sundays. The family went for a meal out on Saturdays. But they got lucky one bank holiday, when their mother had a migraine. The child's dad went to the chippy to get dinner and their mom went up to bed.  
There were 5 low down cupboards in the kitchen. The child looked in every one, being careful not to disturb the pots or the Tupperware. Nowhere was there anything that could be interpreted as a doorway.  
Where else could the child look? Their parents let them play on the patch of grass on the side of the road, but they doubted there was a doorway there, they'd have found it before they even learned about changelings. Other than that, they only went to school. They doubted most of all that a doorway could be there, but they had run out of places to inspect.  
A few days after the bank holiday, there was a wet playtime. This was the perfect time to look round the classroom as long as they were careful to be too obvious.   
Being careful to wait until the teacher was busy with something, they examined the blackboard, running their fingers across the bottom to feel for evidence of a door behind it. They peeked quickly into the teachers supply closet, but could only see paper and pencils.  
Growing increasingly desperate, the child began looking while they were walking to school, or going round the shop or on the bus. They tried their best to inspect their aunts house, but kept getting told to play with their cousins.  
They hated their cousins. Their cousins would make up tricks to get them in trouble, or they would treat the child like they were stupid. The child felt stupid around them. They were too slow to get their jokes, the childs own jokes fell flat. Sometimes they would lock the child in the shed. They would manipulate the child into giving them toys, or eating things that weren't food.  
At least when the children at school picked on them, they weren't required to still play with them.  
A couple of weeks after the wet playtime, the childs teacher had an exciting announcement; their year would be going on a field trip.  
Normally, the child would not find this news exciting. They had to get a school lunch, which on field trips, consisted of a cheese sandwich with mayo, which the child did not like, a fruit, which was fine if it was an orange, but there was more chance of getting an apple or banana, and they did not like the texture of either of them, and a small carton of juice, orange or apple, which were both too sharp tasting.   
The child also did not like the coaches the children would have to travel on. The children behind them usually kicked the back of their chair, and they usually had to sit next to someone. Sonetimes they wouldn't even get the window seat, and would be sat next to someone and have people brush against them when they walked the aisle.  
Then there were the destinations. A theatre where it wasn't good enough to be quiet, the child had to look as if they were paying attention, whilst the greasy seats felt wrong against their legs, and they needed to move.  
Or a farm, which would be good, but they couldn't look at the animals long before they were hurried along to the next animal. And they couldn't ask questions until the end, when they had forgotten them.  
But this field trip was different. They would be going to Hobs Moat Wood. The child thought if any place they could go would have a doorway to the fairyworld, it would be there.  
So now the child could move on to step two of their plot, how to get away from everyone else on the field trip.   
The child had enough sense of how field trips worked to guess that the teachers were not going to let 60 children wander the woods. They would be corralled place to place. There would be headcounts.   
Would it be easier to pretend to feel sick when they got there? No, because then they would have one teacher with their attention on just them, rather than two with their attention on 60 children. Unless one of the other children actually did feel sick, then they could say they felt sick too, and could get away while the teacher was paying attention to the other child. That might work.  
Or maybe there might be an event, or something, which would distract everyone while they got away.  
Maybe if all else failed, they could try to convince their parents that they loved the woods so much they wanted to go for a treat. Their parents didn't usually give them exactly what they wanted like that, but they might do it if it was free. Their parents would be far easier to get away from.  
These were only flimsy plans, of course, but at 7-years-old, the child wasn't particularly well equipped to develop better plans.  
Next the child had to figure out how to take supplies with them. They would need food. Even if they found the fairyworld quickly, they didn't know how long it would take to get to somewhere where they could eat. Or if they could eat the food there.  
This is a list of the things the child ate:  
\- Chips (on bread unless from chippy)  
\- Mashed potatoes (no lumps or weird skin)  
\- peas (garden not processed, and soft)  
\- bread with butter (never on own, white with crust attached so they could take them off and eat on their own, cut across the middle, but slighly diagonally, thin spread of butter)  
\- beans (but only heinz, and only on toast)  
\- Egg (never on toast, can be scrambled beside toast, or fried if flipped over so the yolk wasn't too liquid and only eaten on a sandwich)  
Lemon curd sandwiches (no butter, crusts off, cut into four triangles)  
\- Jam sandwiches (no butter, no bits in jam, very thinly spread)  
Chocolate bars (usually mars, no nuts or coconuts, or fruit)  
Crisps (smoky bacon or prawn cocktail)  
Biscuits (mcvities chocolate digestives)  
Jaffa cakes  
Yogurt (no bits)  
The child didn't know how much of that the fairyworld could cater for.   
They also had only so many drinks they could drink. Cherryade. Milk. Squash if its orange. Lemonade if its schwepes or from a certain supermarket.  
It was things like that which made the child wonder if going would be a good idea. They never had these doubts very long before something would happen and they would be convinced that going would be the best thing.  
Their parents yelling when they thought the child was asleep. Their cousins told them that their parents were only together because they had a kid. If they left, their parents could meet people they actually liked and be happy.  
Shops. With children screaming, parents screaming back, the checkout noises, the loudspeaker announcements. It all made the child feel like they had glass and fire under their skin. Their head would feel scrunched up with all the noise.  
The child might get used to different food. But the child knew they'd never get used to the world they were in.  
So the child thought about which of the food they could eat met the appropriate criteria of: the child could make themselves, and would stay edible until it was time to eat it.   
The jam sandwiches were a possibility. The child needed to be careful about making them though. Their mom guarded the kitchen as fiercely as ever. The best way, the child decided, was to smuggle the components out of the kitchen seperately and assemble the sandwiches in their bedroom. If they could also smuggle a chocolate bar and a bag of crisps, that would be enough.  
Drink posed another problem. Their mother picked up their bag everyday. It couldn't be noticeably heavier of the whole thing would be for nothing. The plan the child came up with was to steal the big bottle of squash when it only had a little bit in. That way the bag wouldn't be heavier, and they could fill the bottle up at school before the bell. Their mother would just assume the bottle had been thrown out.   
Eventually, the day of the field trip arrived. So far, the plan was going great. The sandwiches were in the front pocket of their backpack. The bottle was in the main pocket. The night before, the child had the idea to put a blanket in, and some spare underwear. That morning, they put on a t-shirt and Pyjama bottoms on underneath their school clothes, and fluffy socks and two other school socks on top.  
There was a pleasant surprise waiting for the child when they went to the hall to pick up their lunch. Their normal teacher was off, and they had a substitute. The teacher of the other class had never taught the child, so they were in the company of two teachers that did not know them. They would not stand out.  
The children were herded onto the coach, and the experience was awful for the child but an awfulness lightened by the hope that they would never have to do it again.  
Around midday, after the child had been in the forest for two hours, they spotted the most likely doorway to a fairyworld they had ever seen. In the childs mind, the only way it could look more like a doorway is if there was an actual door. The branches of two trees met together in an arch that had the sunlight hitting it in such a way it glowed.   
The problem was, the children were being shepherded away from it.  
In a rare reversal of his usual behaviour, one of the childs long-term bullies, Thomas Grant, did the child a favour. That favour was tripping on a root and cutting his head open on a rock.  
This enabled the child to get away from most of the other children by claiming that the sight of blood made them feel sick. The substitute had to take Thomas and the child to the visitors building.  
After 15 minutes in the visitors centre, the child claimed they needed the toilet. The substitute distractedly let them go, looking themselves queasy at the sight of blood.   
The child followed a broadly built hiker with an orange shirt that matched the childs hair into the toilet. Once in the toilet stall, they took their school trousers off. The pyjama bottoms underneath were dark blue, so they didn't look odd. The child shoved the school trousers in the bin. They had always hated those trousers. They dug in and left marks on their stomach. Next they took their school jumper off. They shoved that in their bag. They didn't like the jumper much more than the trousers but it was cold out.   
Then they followed them out the same hiker out of the toilets again, and continued following them through the visitor centre doors. The substitute was busy trying to find Thomas's phone number on the permission slips. Out of school uniform, the child did not draw their attention.  
Once the child was out of sight of the visitor centre, they ran. They could still see the sunbeam.   
It took them half an hour to find the arch. They rested their hands on each of the trunks. In all of their planning, they never considered what they would do or say if they got to the doorway.  
If they did get to the doorway.   
"Please." They said in a hushed voice. They only had a bit of time. If they were caught, they would be in so much trouble.  
"Please. Let me in. I need to leave this place!"  
It wasn't working. It wasn't. All of their planning gone to waste and they would never get an opportunity like this again-  
Then they felt the rumbling beneath their feet  
But they couldn't see things rumbling. The rumbling was affecting nothing else in the woods except for them. Then they fell down.  
Years later they fell back down. But thats not important yet.


End file.
